Despite the collection’s inevitable repetition, it provides another necessary, unsettling window into alcohol and art.
A writer confronts his muse, “my woman, my wine, my god.”
Following writing, cats, and love, this is the fourth in what has become a series of Bukowski (1920-1994) anthologies edited by former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow Debritto. Drinking is one of the activities the self-described “life-long alcoholic” was most famous for—and was usually accompanied by writing. Covering the period from 1961 to 1992, the book is a hodgepodge of previously published and unpublished poetry, prose, interviews, letters, humorous drawings, and some photographs, most of the author with a bottle of beer or wine. Bukowski was always honest about his disease. In a 1971 interview, when asked if he was an alcoholic, he responded, “Hell, yes.” He was proud of his capacity for drinking and writing in spite of the suffering and hospital visits it caused. Never a fan of drugs, when drinking, he preferred writing poetry over prose, which was “too much work.” In 1989, he wrote to a friend, “I think I write as well sober as drunk. Took me a long time to find that out.” The collection reveals a man who claims he’s old and getting older, has worked odd jobs here and there, had sex with many women, and written a lot: “I drink when I write. It’s good luck, it’s background music.” Thank goodness Bukowski could laugh about his plight. Responding to an interviewer, he says, “In fact, I am drinking as I answer these questions.” This is a sad and depressing portrait of a talented man in self-destruct mode. In another interview, he says, “drinking is a form of suicide….It’s like killing yourself, and then you’re reborn.” The title of a 1973 poem says it all: “another poem about a drunk and then I’ll let you go.”
Despite the collection’s inevitable repetition, it provides another necessary, unsettling window into alcohol and art.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-285793-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2018
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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